If you think our politics is boiling over now …!

The U.S. Supreme Court today begins hearing arguments on an abortion case arising from the state of Mississippi.

We’re 48 years removed from Roe v. Wade, the court decision that overturned law in the states to find a right hidden in the “penumbra” of the Constitution. If that seems like a long time, consider Brown v Board of Education overturned “separate but equal” 58 years after Plessy v Ferguson 1896.

The Head Groundskeeper herein professes his pro-life credentials, achieved not by his Catholic religion, nor by the marvels of science but by logic alone. To the question of when does human life begin? he reasons thusly: at the beginning.

Medical science has converted other non-believers. Two-pound “preemies” delivered after 22 weeks gestation are surviving — well before the third trimester (28 weeks) when Roe permits states to ban abortion. (More here.) The contested Mississippi statute prohibits abortions after 15 weeks. Embryonic babies have a detectable heartbeat at six weeks.

Blowing retreat

Although the Supremes are not expected to decide before June 2022, the “abortion access correspondent” for The Nation is already ululating. She blames lack of state-level political organizing. (Progressives are always “organizing.”) That’s a tacit acknowledgment that Roe did, indeed, improperly expropriate the legislative process. The author neglects to factor in the shrill, hectoring, finger-wagging of taxpayer-financed, abortion-on-demand hellions.

Over at MSNBC, Ari Melber is blaming that reliable, all-purpose villain: men. Mississippi’s legislature is 83% male (Wisconsin is 69% male — about the national average.) He neglects to mention that the Mississippi state attorney general litigating the case is female.

Not ‘Our bodies, ourselves’

We yield the floor to Ross Douthat in the New York Times to address the morality of abortion:

There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that the embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening, months into pregnancy. But we now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential, like a sperm or ovum, or a constituent part of human tissue, like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception, and every stage of your biological life, from infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, is part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote.  

There is a burden of proof on the pro-choice side to explain why in this case taking another human life is acceptable, indeed a protected right itself. …

Douthat addresses the socio-economic issue:

If there were an integral and unavoidable relationship between abortion and female equality, you would expect … fewer abortions, diminished abortion access, to track with a general female retreat from education and the workplace. But no such thing has happened: Whether measured by educational attainment, managerial and professional positions, breadwinner status or even political office holding, the status of women has risen in the same America where the pro-life movement has (modestly) gained ground.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Hold onto your MAGA caps! The court’s June 2022 decision comes in the midst of state and congressional election campaigns.